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The Boyish Mr. Damon, Not So Boyish After All

MATT DAMON does what few stars with his kind of billing do: he disappears. A character actor who rates multimillion-dollar paychecks, he has an Oscar, a lucrative blockbuster franchise, a wife you have probably never heard of and a résumé that includes Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Soderbergh. This fall he stars in films from Martin Scorsese (“The Departed”) and Robert De Niro (“The Good Shepherd”), for a reunion by proxy for the two directors. In the first Mr. Damon plays a gangster who goes under cover as a cop; in the second he plays a Yale graduate present at the birth of the C.I.A.

Mr. Damon tends to win respect, not swoons, from film critics, but great directors can’t stay away. His boyish looks have certainly helped him land roles, and remain essential to his appeal even at 35. But it is his ability to recede into a film while also being fully present, a recessed intensity, that distinguishes how he holds the screen. When Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp, two other character actors masquerading as stars, take the screen, they tend to make noise. Their beauty creates its own distractions, and their forays into brooding intensity set off flares. Mr. Damon eases into roles so quietly you rarely see him acting.

It’s the type of quiet that can be mistaken for no acting at all and that, much like his trademark smile, can prove deceptive. People magazine anointed him one of the sexiest men alive two years ago, but he seems out of place alongside the silky likes of Mr. Depp. With his heavy brow and a jaw that juts like a fist, Mr. Damon bears little resemblance to the delicate boy-men who have dominated Hollywood recently. He seems a little crude, almost brutal, as if he had been drawn for the Sunday comics. From some angles, with that stub of a nose and a flop of blond, he can look like Dennis the Menace. Cut the hair and he just looks like a menace.

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Matt DamonCredit
J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

It’s this Janus-like quality — the boy next door who turns out to be the killer, the thief and the spy among us — that makes Mr. Damon a consistently surprising screen presence. Rooting around the clammy pathologies of a murderer like Tom Ripley, as he did in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1999), might not have seemed the smartest move for a would-be star with heartthrob potential. Mr. Damon took on “Ripley” soon after “Good Will Hunting” (1997), a potentially risky choice given how hard the director Anthony Minghella tried to pin Ripley’s murderous tendencies on his homoerotic yearnings. With his blue eyes and sunburst smile Mr. Damon looked so pretty, so wholesome. No wonder Bruce Weber kept taking his photograph.

Ripley proved a smart move for a young actor who wanted to show bite as well as teeth. It also showed that Mr. Damon easily plays against type, as evident in his first important screen role, in “School Ties” (1992), as a prep school anti-Semite who makes life tough for the Jewish gridiron hero. That film didn’t make Mr. Damon famous, but it helped make him hungry, and that hunger led to a partnership with his childhood friend Ben Affleck. They wrote “Good Will Hunting” to give themselves the kinds of roles they couldn’t secure otherwise. (Mr. Damon went on to be nominated for best actor.) Mr. Damon played the title character, Will Hunting, a working-class genius from South Boston with issues. Mr. Affleck played his buddy, the guy who isn’t the genius.

There’s a juicy story about the making of “Good Will Hunting” in Peter Biskind’s history of American independent film, “Down and Dirty Pictures.” In their attempt to make the film and in their dealings with Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein, who finally got the project off the page and into theaters, Mr. Damon comes across as tough, if not as savvy about money as Mr. Affleck. In one memorable exchange, Mr. Damon faced down Mr. Weinstein over who would direct. The writers wanted Gus Van Sant. Mr. Weinstein had offered the film to Chris Columbus, then best known for “Home Alone.” Mr. Damon protested Mr. Weinstein’s choice and, in between expletives, the executive shouted: “How ... dare you talk to me like that? You’re a nobody!”

High-end careers like Mr. Damon’s are made on talent, luck, timing, contacts and the camera’s love, but anyone who retains director approval on a film green-lighted by Harvey Weinstein is no fool. Mr. Damon made his share of clunkers while he was a member of the Miramax players, that loose band of young actors and directors who helped turn the company into a powerhouse, but he also made the most of his tenure. Films like “Dogma,” one of four films Mr. Damon made with Kevin Smith, both as a lead and in cameos, solidified his indie cred. Even the duds, like “All the Pretty Horses,” directed by Billy Bob Thornton from the Cormac McCarthy novel and reportedly ravaged in the editing room by Mr. Weinstein, had pedigree.

“Good Will Hunting,” which Mr. Damon initiated when he was a student at Harvard, became one of Miramax’s most profitable releases. Despite some hints of darkness, the film is calculated nonsense of a high order, as phony as anything cooked up by Hollywood committee. Chris Columbus could easily have directed it, after all, though unlike Mr. Van Sant he could not have slipped in the film’s one true scene: Will mocking the therapist played by Robin Williams. (In another version of the screenplay, the therapist sexually services Will.) As Mr. Damon faces the camera in searching close-up, we see the cruelty slide across Will’s face like a shadow and, as important, we see the pleasure he derives from that cruelty.

Like most of Mr. Damon’s films, “Good Will Hunting” did not require him to go deep all the way through. Will and the therapist share a manly hug and tears moisten Mr. Damon’s face, while the script perfunctorily dredges up a foster father who liked to swing a wrench. But “Good Will Hunting” is principally a story about the triumph of the human spirit, as they like to say in Hollywood (and Miramax had already long gone Hollywood), and as such could never withstand any serious character excavation. Glibness was as crucial to the film’s success as Mr. Weinstein’s salesmanship. Mr. Damon needed only to suggest pain and wrap himself in Mr. Williams’s furry arms to sell the character, both of which he did.

Actors like to show hurt, but it was Mr. Damon’s ability to play mean (to Mrs. Doubtfire!) that stuck. Since then he has made a practice of taking on characters who are significantly darker than their smiling good looks suggest. That divide between his characters’ appearances and actions is critical to “The Talented Mr. Ripley” as well as the “Bourne” and “Ocean’s” films, in which Mr. Damon plays a con man named Linus. Mr. Soderbergh obviously enjoys riffing off the actor’s youthful affect. In “Ocean’s Eleven” (2001), Mr. Pitt and George Clooney look as if they stepped right out off the cover of GQ. Mr. Damon, by contrast, wears a windbreaker and a striped shirt that could have been designed by Charles M. Schulz.

The “Ocean’s” films are larks (a third is on the way), but they also provided Mr. Damon new buddies. Following “Ocean’s Twelve” (2004), he signed on for a lead role in the political intrigue “Syriana” (2005), a project initiated at Mr. Clooney and Mr. Soderbergh’s production company. An American energy analyst stationed in Geneva, Mr. Damon’s Bryan Woodman comes to personify the ugly contradictions of capitalism. His moment of truth comes in the Middle East when, after a moment’s hesitation, he accepts a lucrative contract with the sheik whose family he blames for the death of his oldest son. “How much,” Woodman asks with deadpan bitterness, “for my other kid?”

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Matt Damon as a spy with Angelina Jolie in The Good Shepherd, directed by Robert De Niro. Credit
Andrew Schwartz/Universal Pictures

“Syriana” sounds tougher than it plays, largely because the lead performances tend to be too sympathetic for what the characters are meant to represent. Even so, in his most pivotal scene in the film, Mr. Damon manages to keep the character’s grief from tipping over to pathos and into our sympathies. Soon after he unloads that vicious line about his dead son, pausing to let the words hover uncomfortably, he starts pitching the sheik with an eagerness that would make Sammy Glick blush. As he illustrates part of his sales pitch by drawing a diagram in the sand, Bryan Woodman resumes the clear voice and steady gestures of an American businessman skillfully riding out the storms of free-market globalization.

The sins of American fathers being visited on sons and an occasional daughter has been a recent favorite theme in films. While “Syriana” suffers from Oedipal overload, the bad-dad motif is handled nimbly in the two “Bourne” films (a third is also on the way), where the back story takes a back seat to the action. As Jason Bourne, Mr. Damon fully inhabits the black-bag operative who has only the faintest memories of his past. When not stomping on someone’s solar plexus, this amnesiac superspy tends to look like a college graduate on a European amble. He also looks young enough for his tuition to have been paid by Harrison Ford, who a decade earlier had a lock on big-budget action in spy stories like “Patriot Games.”

The paternalistic decency of Mr. Harrison’s persona in films like “Patriot Games” seemed very much of its Clintonian moment, just as Mr. Damon’s voyage to the dark side in the “Bourne” thrillers seems very much of this moment. The principled intelligence operatives beloved of Hollywood have given way to new moral ambiguities. The “Bourne” films bear little resemblance to Robert Ludlum’s original books, but Mr. Damon’s intense physicality and the lethal naïveté of his character are suggestive of Graham Greene’s description of the title character in his novel “The Quiet American”: the young American agent, who while in Vietnam in the 1950’s enters with “an unmistakably young and unused face flung at us like a dart” and a “wide campus gaze” that “seemed incapable of harm.”

Greene makes short, nasty work of that young American, whose innocent face is a mask for catastrophic arrogance. In the 1950’s, the decade when his novel was first published and when Hollywood began its love affair with Method acting, American movie screens were filled with faces crumbling under the weight of their own sensitivities. Even now, the romance of suffering, which reaffirms the centrality of individualism even in martyrdom, retains an irresistible hold on our films and ideas about men, with Marlon Brando’s howl having given way to Ryan Gosling’s. There is no such romance in the toothy smiles of the American boys next door of the sort often played by Mr. Damon. Those smiles are designed for glory and fluttering American flags, although, as the actor’s quiet ascendancy suggests, sometimes those smiles are also designed to hide something sinister, frightening, deadly.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR37 of the New York edition with the headline: The Boyish Mr. Damon, Not So Boyish After All. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe